The French government has launched a programme aimed at reducing the health service’s reliance on software provided by US technology company Microsoft, in a significant shift driven by concerns over digital sovereignty and foreign control of critical infrastructure.
Central to the issue is the Plateforme des données de santé (PDS), a digital platform which, since its creation in 2019, has been hosted on Microsoft Azure, despite reservations expressed by France’s data protection authority, the CNIL.
The PDS contains records of almost every electronic interaction within the French health service. Security specialists say information that could identify patients or healthcare professionals has been removed, with the data retained in anonymised form to support medical research.
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Opposition to entrusting such a sensitive system to a US company has been a recurring theme in French political debate, focusing on the implications of placing critical infrastructure under foreign legal and political control.
The issue has gained prominence amid wider geopolitical tensions, including during the second presidency of Donald Trump and under US Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Particular concern followed US sanctions imposed on judges at the International Criminal Court in The Hague, which intensified European debate over the vulnerability of public institutions reliant on large US technology providers.
US legislation such as the Cloud Act and provisions under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) has further reinforced fears that US authorities could compel disclosure of data held by American cloud providers, even when stored in Europe.
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Digital sovereignty concerns are not limited to health data. The European Parliament has replaced Google with the French search engine Qwant on thousands of internal systems, although Qwant itself has faced criticism for reliance on Microsoft’s Bing infrastructure.
In France, similar concerns extend to government communication systems. The secure messaging platform Tchap, used by ministers and civil servants, was recently compromised after a hacker gained control of a user account. The Direction interministérielle du Numérique (DINUM) said no stored messages were accessed.
The government has also promoted adoption of the French-developed encrypted messaging app Olvid as an alternative to US-owned platforms such as WhatsApp, although uptake remains limited.
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I think there’s a strong argument for all server software used by governments to be open source, and a strong preference for the same on desktop.
At this point its clear that large tech companies are adversarial. They’re harvesting value and now knowledge and creative works from is to enrich themselves.
Manager-y people and businesses love Microsoft because they’re “official”, and they have certain guarantees about service and support.
It’s a hard sell to your CTO to switch to Linux when Microsoft has an actual salesperson representative turn up, and open source has… Nobody. Except maybe the internal I.T. team, but nobody listens to them for important decisions.
People also don’t really understand open source. It seems communist and weird to them. “So what, if there’s a bug, someone just decides to fix it when they feel like it? No manager cracking the whip?” That’s foreign and scary to them, and implies that workers can make good products without whips. Safer to go with the familiar multibillion (or is it trillion now?) business
There are lots of large companies selling support for Linux. They have salespersons and SLOs (IBM/Redhat, Suse and many more), This won’t help decision makers not giving a shit about long term strategy (also called capitalism).
I’ve never seen or heard of one. But I’ve heard Redhat is a bit of a weird case, they’re proprietary right?